Last winter during the pandemic, Jack Boswell started to reevaluate his place in life and realize that at the age of 31, he still hadn’t chased his real passion of being a Hollywood screenwriter. So he decided to quit his job and hop on a plane where he lived in London to head to Los Angeles and give it a go. But instead of flying directly there, he figured he’d instead land in Boston and make his way across the United States by train, documenting the places he visited and the people he met along the way. Out of his experiences, he crafted the first season of his podcast “Off the Beaten Jack,” which ended up being nominated as best new podcast in the British Podcast Awards. On this episode of Far From Home, I chat with Jack Boswell and we listen to some excerpts from his show.

If you’re interested in learning more about Jack’s style of traveling, you can look into couchsurfing and Workaway volunteer opportunities (or Worldpackers, which is similar).

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On Far From Home, award-winning public radio journalist Scott Gurian documents fascinating stories from far-flung places like Iran, Chernobyl, and Mongolia. For more info, visit farfromhomepodcast.org

As you may have seen in my feed, I recently teamed up with my colleagues at NPR’s Planet Money economic podcast to report a story that prominently featured the Central Asian country of Turkmenistan — which is probably one of the most obscure countries in the world, and certainly not a place that most of us hear much about, much less visit. Only about 10,000 tourists a year cross its borders, but in the summer of 2016, my brother, my friends Rosi and Jane, and I were some of the lucky few. We drove across Turkmenistan as part of an 11,000 mile road trip we were taking from London to Mongolia, raising money for charity.

I documented that journey on the first season of this podcast, and today — for all my new listeners — I’m re-releasing an excerpt of one of my favorite episodes (#11) called “Turkmenistan: Just Plain Weird.” If you enjoy this, I recommend going back to the very beginning of my feed and listening to my first season in its entirety!

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On Far From Home, award-winning public radio journalist Scott Gurian documents fascinating stories from far-flung places like Iran, Chernobyl, and Mongolia. For more info, visit farfromhomepodcast.org

A few months ago, a friend of mine named Oraz who runs an autobody repair shop in Turkmenistan came across a kind of puzzle. A new vehicle had just arrived on his lot. A white Lexus SUV. He could see by the registration sticker that it came from my home state of New Jersey, but the even stranger thing was the shape it was in. It was practically brand new, unlike like the dented and mangled cars that usually come to him for repairs.

Oraz wondered: how did this car get here, to his shop? And what kind of place, what kind of person, casts off such a nice new car? Those questions led me on a journey through the international used car underground... all the way back to a pleasant, two-story home in suburban New Jersey. To find the answers, I team up with reporter Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi of NPR’s Planet Money podcast, which features fun and surprising stories about the global economy.

To hear the complete story of my road trip from the UK to Mongolia — when I broke down in the middle of the desert and first met Oraz — scroll back to the beginning of my feed and check out the first season of my podcast.

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On Far From Home, award-winning public radio journalist Scott Gurian documents fascinating stories from far-flung places like Iran, Chernobyl, and Mongolia. For more info, visit farfromhomepodcast.org

I’m always open to listener feedback on Far From Home, and I heard from someone recently who’s given me a new perspective on one of my past stories and forced me to see things in a new light, so I wanted to share it with all of my listeners.

Several years ago on the show, I featured a series of stories about Lucho, a traditional medicine man from Peru who describes himself as a "curandero," or someone who heals. Using medicinal herbs, archaeological relics, and hallucinogenic plants, he claims to have rid himself of diabetes and his father of cancer. He regularly travels around his country treating people with all sorts of ailments.

In part one of my series, I joined Lucho as he embarked on a journey up the coast, searching for a star-shaped stone with supposed magical powers that he saw in a vision.

Then I accompanied him to a healing ceremony in a shantytown on the outskirts of Lima where he served participants a hallucinogenic brew called ayahuasca. I’d originally planned on simply observing and documenting the event, but once I was there, I decided to take Lucho up on his offer to consume a small amount of the potion myself to understand what the experience was like for everyone else. It didn’t seem to have much of an effect on me, however, and I wondered in the story whether I might be somehow immune.

In a bonus episode, I also shared the story of my friend Dennis, who similarly tried ayahuasca during his visit to Peru and felt like it didn’t live up to his expectations.

But after chatting recently with Nora Dunn, I’ve realized that perhaps my takeaways from my experience as well as my presentation of the topic might not have been entirely fair. Nora’s been traveling the world as a digital nomad for the past 17 years, blogging as The Professional Hobo, and she also spent several years working with shamans in Ecuador and Peru. On this episode, I revisit my previous reporting and get Nora’s insights on what I might have gotten wrong.

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On Far From Home, award-winning public radio journalist Scott Gurian documents fascinating stories from far-flung places like Iran, Chernobyl, and Mongolia. For more info, visit farfromhomepodcast.org

While I’ve been hunkered down these past few years, avoiding traveling and staying home while I rode out the pandemic, I’ve been incredibly lucky that I’ve had a safe and comfortable place to live. But what has this experience been like for people in living situations that failed to provide basic levels of safety, privacy, and comfort?

On this episode of Far From Home, I play an episode from the Shelter podcast series that I co-produced with Rutgers University, coLAB Arts, and the New Brunswick Theological Seminary looking at the topic of housing insecurity in the era of Covid-19.

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On Far From Home, award-winning public radio journalist Scott Gurian documents fascinating stories from far-flung places like Iran, Chernobyl, and Mongolia. For more info, visit farfromhomepodcast.org

Over the past 2 months, more than 5 million people have left Ukraine, and another 6-and-a-half-million have fled their homes and are now displaced elsewhere within their own country, making this Europe’s largest humanitarian crisis since World War II. Neighboring countries are struggling to keep up with the exodus, but they’ve generally been fairly welcoming, which many critics have pointed out is a markedly different approach from how they’ve treated African and Middle Eastern refugees in the past.

With so much of the world’s attention now focused on Ukraine, I thought I’d spend some time this episode featuring the voices of refugees from other parts of the world, since their stories are of course equally important. The recordings come from the Sound Seekers Audio Festival and were produced by refugee, asylum, and migrant communities in partnership with community radio stations, the Irish Research Council, and the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland.

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On Far From Home, award-winning public radio journalist Scott Gurian documents fascinating stories from far-flung places like Iran, Chernobyl, and Mongolia. For more info, visit farfromhomepodcast.org

On this episode, I speak to Savelli and Olexander, two Ukrainians who’ve suddenly had their lives upended after the Russian military invaded their country.

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On Far From Home, award-winning public radio journalist Scott Gurian documents fascinating stories from far-flung places like Iran, Chernobyl, and Mongolia. For more info, visit farfromhomepodcast.org

Central Asia is not a place that most Westerners know or think about very often. But now that I’ve been there, my ears perk up on the rare instances when it makes the news, as was the case on two separate occasions over the past few weeks. In light of recent developments in Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan, I re-play excerpts of some episodes I featured several years ago on the first season of Far From Home, where I documented an 11,000 mile road trip my friends and I took from the UK to Mongolia in a couple of really tiny cars.

If you’re new to the program, I recommend going back to the very beginning of my podcast feed and bingeing the entire story of my journey. In particular, if you want to listen to longer versions of the stories I played on today’s show, here are the links:

“Kazakhstan: One Surprise After Another” (ep. 19)

“Turkmenistan: Just Plain Weird” (ep. 11) - go to that link also to see a video of my friends and I approaching the giant fire pit in the middle of Turkmenistan’s Karakum Desert

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On Far From Home, award-winning public radio journalist Scott Gurian documents fascinating stories from far-flung places like Iran, Chernobyl, and Mongolia. For more info, visit farfromhomepodcast.org

Take Santa Claus. Then ditch the red suit and the flying reindeer, and you’ve got a guy who’s all about giving. On this last episode of my third season, I tell the story of the time my dad tried out the role and got more than he bargained for!

This story originally aired many years ago on NPR’s Day to Day. Thanks to my editor Russell Lewis.

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On Far From Home, award-winning public radio journalist Scott Gurian documents fascinating stories from far-flung places like Iran, Chernobyl, and Mongolia. For more info, visit farfromhomepodcast.org

Nearly 2 years into the Covid-19 pandemic, new waves of infection continue to spread around the world, and the Omicron variant is causing renewed fears in places that previously thought they had the virus under control. So I’m releasing another episode in my series where I check in with friends and colleagues around the world to get a sense of what things are like where they live. This time we hear voices from Thailand, Ukraine, Guatemala, Belgium, Finland, and Vietnam. If you’ve missed the previous three installments of my COVID Stories series, you can check them out in my season 3 archive.

If you’re a regular listener of my show, I’d love to hear your feedback on this series. Do you enjoy it, or are you tired of it, and you think I should move on to something else? You can let me know by emailing me at [email protected]

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On Far From Home, award-winning public radio journalist Scott Gurian documents fascinating stories from far-flung places like Iran, Chernobyl, and Mongolia. For more info, visit farfromhomepodcast.org